Leases are intentionally complicated, with many of the numbers buried to obscure the facts. One of the best ways to cut through this is to take the MSRP, subtract any down payment on the lease, and then divide what remains by the lease payment to get the number of months (years) you’d own the car before you fully paid for it. Typically you’re looking at 5-6 years, a dood deal is 8 years and a great deal is north of 10 years. I took a Lucid Air Pure on Lucid’s site for example: $70700 MSRP, $7101 due at delivery plus a $500 down payment, $619 monthly payment. So ($70700 - $7601) / 619 = 102 months or 8.5 years. That’s a good lease. Go to Leasehacker and you can find a detailed calculator/ breakdown and some really good deals. With incentives, ie Costco, Military discount, etc, there’s for example an Ionic 5 on the at 12.3 years, a new Audi Q6 E-tron at 9.6 years, etc.
The Dream lease shown above works out to 4.9 years. So while they show things like $7500 EV savings, etc, they are making up for that elsewhere in the deal to net out at a very poor lease deal. There are many knobs they can turn- residual value, interest rates, etc. These will determine if there’s any percentage in leasing and then buying shortly after, but my suspicion is they will have covered that off (the Gravity in current trim is too expensive to qualify for government money, so Lucid is simply adding a line showing a rebate in the lease, then making that money back elsewhere).
You can currently lease a loaded EV 9 at roughly 1/3 the cost of a moderate spec Gravity GT. We’ll see how long Lucid is able to command this premium.
